Private museums of the Siberian Polish community

Abstract

The article describes the process of creating private
Polish diaspora collections in Siberia. Currently, many collections related to the Siberian Polish diaspora are located in private (home) museums throughout Russia, but most of them are in the Urals and Western Siberia. The author describes the Polish collections gathered in the “Ufa and Ufa Residents” Museum, Polonica collected during the preparation of the exhibition “Poland’s place in the history of Siberia,” which took place on September 5-6, 2013, in Shushenskoye, and the rich collections of the only historical and ethnographic museum in Siberia, “Poles in the Tyumen Oblast.” In the current geopolitical reality, the preservation of Polish artifacts in Siberia is an extremely important task. Not only are Polish artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries valuable, but documents, photographs, and objects from the 1990s, from the time when Polishness and the Polish diaspora movement were reviving in the former republics of the USSR, are also of great importance.